Classically, a sender in a communications network has several solutions or solutions available when he wishes to transmit a message to an intended recipient through a communications network. A first solution, which is a basic solution, is that of calling the recipient through a telephone terminal and vocally imparting the information to be given to him. A second solution, which is equally classic but technologically more recent, consists of the transmission of an SMS (Short Message Service) type short message to a terminal of the intended recipient. The recipient can receive this message either through a mobile telecommunications terminal or a land-line communications terminal subscribing to a service for receiving such messages or again, through a personal computer. A third solution is a solution for transmitting an electronic mail message or email message to the intended recipient when he or she has a valid electronic mail (or email) address. In a fourth solution, a message is transmitted through an instantaneous messaging application.
A fifth solution which is currently very popular is that of transmitting messages through personal pages in social networks. Social networks of this kind such as Facebook™, Pikeo™, etc. enable users to belong to communities and transmit messages to all or part of the recipients belonging to any one of the communities to which the sender belongs. One of the main attractions of these social networks for the sender is that he has the greatest possible number of recipients available. It will be understood however that the number of messages sent to a recipient is very great and that it can be difficult for a recipient to distinguish between interesting and uninteresting messages.
Other solutions exist. There is however one characteristic common to all these solutions: it is difficult or even impossible in certain cases to enable reception by the recipient of a message, sent from a given platform, on a platform other than the one originally chosen. In other words, it is difficult for example to receive an SMS message sent from a mobile terminal on a PC that has no specific application or service. Similarly, it is difficult to receive an email message sent from a PC on a classic type of mobile terminal i.e., a simple terminal that can receive only SMS or MMS messages (i.e. a terminal that is not a smartphone). Now, it is true that many users have every means of message transmission and reception at their disposal (mobile terminals, land-line terminals, email messaging services, instantaneous messaging services). However, it is tedious for a recipient to have to check all these resources to find out whether or not a new message has been received.
Moreover, these message sending and receiving means are being increasingly clogged with unsolicited messages. For it is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid reception of advertisement messages for example. Electronic mailboxes are containing an ever increasing number of advertisement messages, so that it is becoming difficult to spot, among these advertisement messages, those messages truly sent to the recipient by a sender known to him or to her.
Thus, incidentally, the message has totally lost its value as a vector of data transmission between users since it is buried in a whole set of messages that are most frequently unsolicited by the recipient. In addition to the technological barriers that prevent messages from being transmitted from one platform to a terminal connected to another platform, the inventors have noted that the value of the message per se has truly diminished to the extent where certain recipients no longer even pay any attention to the messages that they might receive on such and such a platform. This is true of messages received by email which are increasingly being seen as an outdated vector for the transmission of information.
The inventors have thus observed that it is urgent to propose a novel means of message transmission and reception that can be used to emphasize a particular event so that the message is not diluted in the mass of messages received by the user.